Integrating geothermal heating and cooling networks in Europe

SAPHEA addresses the market uptake of geothermal energy and underground heat storage supplied multivalent heating and cooling networks (‘geoHC networks’), which operate at temperatures of less than 30°C and up to around 100°C. The range of applications of geoHC networks starts at local-scale networks with capacity levels of at least 500 kWth, including sub- and peri-urban regions across Europe. SAPHEA will address the installation of new geoHC networks (greenfield installations or replacement of individual heating and cooling solutions), as well as the retrofitting of existing, fossil fuel-supplied heating networks.

SAPHEA’s overall goal is therefore to address the prevailing barriers of renewable heat by developing and supporting market uptake measures for enabling geoHC networks to significantly contribute to the European HC sector. This in turn will contribute to a gradual and continuous replacement of fossil fuels while at the same time increasing the use of on-site available, low-exergy RES in order to reach the 2050 zero net emissions goals of the European Union.

The SAPHEA project team developed a Catalogue of scenarios in the framework of its WP 2 to identify existing basic and complex scenarios for the integration of shallow and deep geothermal energy into heating and cooling networks (HC networks) of different scales. These settings are complemented by new developments, which are not state of the art now, but could be promising scenarios for the future. The networks cover in this case all categories of grid generations used for heating and cooling. Based on these scenarios the SAPHEA project will now work on providing information about the potential to implement geothermal energy into heating and cooling networks in Europe.